Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black

“Pikey Paul!” said Alison. “Keep it low! Don’t talk so obscene. You never used to have such a filthy tongue in your head!”

“They’re queueing up for multiple tongues,” Paul said. “I seen ’em. What I say is mild, believe me. You want to hear ’em in the years to come. No sentence will be clean.”

“I can believe it,” Alison said. She began to cry. “All the same, Paul, I wish I’d had a spirit guide like you. Morris never brought me a present. Not so much as a bunch of flowers.”

“You should have kicked him out,” Paul said. “You should have kicked him out like Mrs. Etchells kicked him out. Soon as she saw my Spanish dolly, she hoisted him up in her arms—she was sinewy in those days, and you know how squat he is—she carried him down the road and she dumped him in a skip. Then she come back and cooked us some pancakes. I was uncommonly fond of pancakes with syrup, but now I lay off ’em, as I’ve to watch my waistline, which don’t we all. Now I was looking for a place to call my own, and I had a billet where I could come and go, ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies, she was easygoing, was Mrs. Etchells. We was suited—that’s how you could express it. Little op, chain of love, joys of motherhood, she never varied it and why should she? Meanwhile I got on with my own life. She had a stack of testimonials, handwritten, some of them in real fountain pen by titled people, stacked up in that sideboard there.”

“What sideboard?” Al said.

“That sideboard that one of my fambly has removed, namely Pikey Pete.

To sell it on.”

“He should be ashamed,” Alison said. The Sensitives, acting on instinct or by training, had formed a semicircle around Al, aware that she was experiencing a manifestation. Only Colette walked away, bored, and stood with drooping head, her fingers flaking yellowed paint from the front windowsill. Silvana rubbed and rubbed at a spot below her jawline: trying, perhaps, to ease her teak-coloured line of tan into the tint of her flesh. The women stood, patient, till Pikey Paul vanished in a dull red flash, his suit of lights depleted, bagged at the knee and sagged at the seat, his aura—trailing on the air—resembling no more than a greasy smear of old-fashioned men’s hair cream.

“That was Pikey Paul,” Al said. “Mrs. E’s guide. Unfortunately he didn’t say anything about the will.”

“Okay,” said Cara. “Dowsing it is. If it’s here at all, it can only be under the lino or slid behind the wallpaper.” She opened her beaded satchel and took out her pendulum.

“Oh, you use a bobber,” Mandy said, interested. “Brass, is it? I swear by a Y-Rod, myself.”

Silvana took out of a carrier bag what looked like a length of lavatory chain, with a metal nut on the end. She glanced at Colette, as if daring her to say something. “It was my dad’s,” she said. “He was a plumber.”

“You could be done for carrying that around,” Gemma said. “Offensive weapon.”

“Tools of her trade,” Mandy said. “Did you get your Sight from your dad, then? That’s unusual.”

“Alison doesn’t know who her dad was,” Colette said. “She thought she had it worked out, but her mum knocked her theory on the head.”

“She’s not the only one,” Mandy said. “I believe that in your case too, Colette, what’s on the birth certificate isn’t quite the same as what’s in the genes.”

Al’s been gossiping, Colette thought: and yet she said it was all in confidence! How could she? She stored it up, for a future row.

“I don’t even have a birth certificate,” Al said. “Not that I know of. To be honest, I’m not really sure how old I am. I mean my mum gave me a date, but it might not be true. I can never remember my age when things were done to me or when things happened. It’s because they always said to me, if anybody asks, you’re sixteen, right? Which is confusing when you’re only about nine.”

“Poor love,” Mandy breathed.

“You must be recorded somewhere,” Colette said. “I’ll look into it. If you had no birth certificate, how did you get a passport?”

“That’s a point,” Al said. “How did I? Maybe we can dowse for my documentation, when we’re done here. Okay, look, ladies, you do down here—don’t forget to take that armchair apart. I’ll go and check upstairs.”

“Do you want somebody with you?” Gemma asked.

Mandy said in a low voice, “Let her have some privacy. Doesn’t matter whether she was her gran or not, she looked up to Irene Etchells.”

Pete had stripped out the stair carpet, so the creak of each tread carried to the women back in the parlour and, as their pendulums twitched, each tiny impulse registered an answering twitch in Alison, just above her diaphragm. The rooms were bare, but when she opened the wardrobe, a row of garments still hung there, close-covered against moths. She parted their calico shrouds; her hand brushed silk and crepe. They were Mrs. Etchells’s performance gowns, from her days of triumph on distant platforms. Here was a peacock green faded to grey, here a rose-pink faded to ash. She examined them: crystal beads rolled beneath finger and thumb, and a scatter of pewter-coloured sequins drifted to the floor of the wardrobe. She leaned in, breathing the smell of cedar, and began to scoop them into her cupped hand, thinking of Pikey Paul. But as she straightened up, she thought, no, I’ll buy him new. I’m patient for sewing, as long as it’s spirit sewing, and he’ll appreciate something more shiny than these. I wonder why Pete left her frocks? Probably thought they were worth nothing. Men! He had plundered the saggy polyester skirts and the cardigans that Mrs. Etchells usually wore; these, Al supposed, he would be selling onto some poor Iraqi grandma who’d lost everything but what she stood up in, or somebody who’d been bombed out in the Blitz; for in Spirit World, wars run concurrently.

She let the sequins drift, between her fingers, to the bare boards; then picked two empty wire hangers from the wardrobe. She wrenched them out of shape, formed each into a rod with a hook for a handle, and held them in front of her. She followed their guidance into the back room. They bucked and turned in her hand, and while she waited for them to settle she looked out of the uncurtained window onto the site of urban clearance beyond. Probably going to build a mews, she thought. For now, she had a clear view of the back plots of the neighbouring street, with its lean-tos and lockup garages, its yellowed nylon curtains billowing from open windows, its floribundas breaking through the earth and swelling into flagrant blood-dark bloom: a view of basking men throwing sickies, comatose in canvas chairs, their white bellies peeping from their shirts, their beer cans winking and weakly dribbling in the sun. From an upper storey hung a flag—ENGLAND—red on white: as if it could be somewhere else, she thought. Her eye carried to the street beyond, where on the corner stood municipal receptacles for the sorting and storage of waste, disposal bins for glass, others for grass, others for fabrics, for paper, for shoes; and at their feet clustered black sacks, their mouths tied with yellow tape.

The rods in her hands convulsed, and their hooks cut into her palms. She followed them to the corner of the room, and at their direction, laying them down, she tore into a foot of rotting linoleum. Her nails clawed at a seam; she inched two fingers under it and pulled. I should have a knife, she thought, why didn’t I bring a knife? She stood up, took a deep breath, bent again, tugged, tugged. There was a crack, a splintering; floorboards showed; she saw a small piece of paper, folded. She bent painfully to scoop it up. She unfolded it, and as she did so the fibres of the paper gave way, and it fell apart along the folds. My birth certificate, she thought: but no, it was barely six lines. First a blurred rubber stamp—PAID TO—then Emmeline Cheetham was written beneath, in a florid, black hand: THE SUM OF SEVEN SHILLINGS AND SIX-PENCE. Underneath came another stamp, at an angle to the above, RECEIVED WITH THANKS: and then in her mother’s youthful hand, her signature, Emmeline Cheetham : below that, IN WITNESS WHEREOF: Irene Etchells (Mrs.). Beneath the signature, the paper had a brown indentation, as if it had been ironed briefly on a high setting. As the nail of her little finger touched the scorch mark, the paper flaked away, leaving a ragged gap where the mark had been.